


the energy never dies

by kathillards



Category: Power Rangers, Power Rangers Megaforce
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Grid Theory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-06
Updated: 2016-02-06
Packaged: 2018-05-18 12:18:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5928051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kathillards/pseuds/kathillards
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Troy dreams in color, most nights. —- or, a study on how the world looks when your dreams are a battlefield.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the energy never dies

**Author's Note:**

> megaforce: so troy has these cool prophetic dreams, but, like, only of sentai footage  
> me:  
> me:  
> me: ok but consider this -

**the energy never dies**

_we could all be blown to pieces_  
_because time's a ticking bomb_  
 _we could all be dead tomorrow_  
 _but our love will carry on_

— the script, the energy never dies

* * *

 

Troy dreams in color, most nights. Flashes of red and blue and yellow. Explosions in vibrant golds and oranges, rocketing into blue skies. A park full of green trees and a glimmering lake. A spaceship in metallic silvers. A clock tower in white stone and brown brick. An island shining under the sun.

They're not all nice - fights and monsters and broken hearts. Loved ones slipping away into an abyss. Racing into space and watching Earth fall behind. He wakes up in a cold sweat from memories of battles he's never fought and evil he hasn't seen except when it crawls inside his skin at night and leaves him shaking from its grip on his heart.

But even the nightmares he wouldn't trade for the dreams of a land without color. Nothing but sepia wastelands, the static buzz of electricity, the ruins of a world he didn't save. A glass dome in the distance, the sky in smoke above him. The steady hum of something dangerous lurking behind every stone.

The ones of the wasteland world aren't nightmares, exactly. Aren't anything, exactly. Just flashes of a life he hasn't lived. A world he hasn't survived. Hints that something - something is wrong, something is very, very wrong. He wakes up from those dreams with an accelerated heartbeat and a sense that he's living on borrowed time.

Sometimes, there's a flower in the wastelands. Bright yellow and a green stem. A burst of color in a colorless world.

Something that matters to somebody - somebody he should know, but doesn't.

-:-

He doesn't really tell people about his dreams. His father wouldn't understand, always too busy with his own battles. His military badges burn a hole in Troy's heart, but there's no way to explain, so he doesn't. Maybe war runs in his veins.

His mother smiles sleepily at him from her deathbed, touches his cheek and says, " _My dear boy, my brave, brave boy_ ," and he can't burden her heart with his dreams, not in her last days. She sees the monsters on tv and tells him, _"Don't be afraid, Troy, you can face anything. You can face everything._ "

He doesn't know if he believes it, but there's no time for second-guessing. His father sends him away at sixteen to live with his uncle in a city he's never heard of because his mother is dead and nobody talks to him at school, anyway, not the boy with the fight simmering beneath his skin and the dreams of a lost world burning behind his eyelids.

-:-

Troy dreams in red a lot. A boy's shirt, a karate belt, a flower for a pretty girl he's never seen before in his life. Blood streaking down someone's arms. Fire in the background as people scream for help.

He doesn't know what he prefers - the people he's never met with faces that feel familiar, or the battles he hasn't fought but that feel like his war to win, anyway.

Every once in a while, a face appears in his dreams that stays with him in his waking hours. Two boys, laughing. A blonde girl, a brunette in the forest. A boy in a quarry. Flashes of silver and gold and red that he doesn't fully understand.

Stars. He sees a lot of stars. The girl in pink is smiling, pointing, saying, " _We come from there_." The boy in silver falls out of them. He doesn't know what it means, doesn't know their names, doesn't know the stories - but he keeps count of the stars, anyway.

When the wasteland dreams come back to him, he starts counting the stars there, too. The constellations are the same, the lights are just as bright and silver. In the wastelands, they seem like an infinity away.

In the dreams in color, stars feel like a second home.

-:-

His first day in a new city, under a new sky, he falls asleep on the bus and dreams of the battle again. The war he keeps seeing, the one tattooed onto his eyes by now. The one he can't forget - the explosions and the shouts and the terror. The strength and the power and the heroes around him.

He doesn't know if he's taking part in it or just watching from afar. Doesn't know what it means that every time he sees someone in red, his heart skips a beat. Doesn't know why he can feel his dreams this way.

Nobody else dreams like this. He knows, he's tried asking. There's a reason he didn't have any friends to lose by moving away.

-:-

His uncle can't drive him home, and he doesn't have a car in this town yet, so he stays late after school, practicing martial arts on a rooftop overlooking the city. His mother had him put into lessons when he was young, saying she always knew he was meant to be a fighter, a warrior, a hero.

He doesn't know about that, but when he looks over the city, awash in sunlight, the buildings gleaming silver and white under the afternoon sky, he thinks he could be, if he had to. Feels a surge, a rush, of pride - entirely unwarranted, emotions for a home he's only had for a day.

The part of his mind that's still angry at his father for dropping him off here with a sandwich and a half-hearted goodbye raises its hackles in protest. He doesn't want to like this place. Doesn't want to be here. Doesn't want to make a home here.

But the wasteland flashes through his thoughts - endless desert, a boy in black, a car running on fumes. A prison underneath the sand, where children cry and girls go blind. A red plane tumbling out of the sky, a blaze of fire and death.

He looks at the colors of Harwood again, thinks, maybe he's lucky to be here.

-:-

His dreams become worse after the power, not better. He pulls away from his team, the red sitting awkward on his shoulders, ignores the weight of the golden morpher at his bedside table when he wakes up from another nightmare.

Out of all his dreams, he prefers the ones of the people he hasn't met - their lives, their stories, their beginnings and endings. Five teenagers laughing in a juice bar. A boy in red skateboarding; two brothers dirtbiking. A cafe filled with computers and chatter and a girl in yellow singing on the stage. Two kids living on the streets, stealing to survive.

Ever since he was entrusted with the power, the faces fade away, replaced only by the war. He hates the fighting, the explosions, the yells, hates the way they make him feel when he wakes up, terrified and alone in a sea of other people's grief and other people's losses. Hates watching the girl in pink sacrifice herself over and over, watching the little boy fall off a cliff into a demon's hands, watching the lovers separate by the sea.

The happy moments vanish, leaving behind only fire and smoke and sorrow. He doesn't want to live in these people's memories anymore, doesn't even know who they are, doesn't want to watch them fight in a war they're too young for and leave behind a part of themselves on the battlefield.

He wakes up, drenched in sweat, and stares down at his hands, waiting for them to stop shaking, wondering what he'll lose in the upcoming war.

-:-

His team - his friends, he reminds himself - learn about the dreams eventually, but only the big one, the one that keeps showing up, the one where they're all fighting and he hasn't seen the ending yet. He doesn't tell them about seeing their faces before, about knowing the sound of Jake's laugh before he heard it, or that Emma had a photographer's eye before he even met her.

He doesn't tell them about the other boy, or the other world, or all the other battles with foregone conclusions - victory at a price, broken hearts and bloodshed. The world where the scent of death clings to every rock and stone, where he knows - he knows - they are not alive anymore.

Some nights, when his mind decides to spare him from the battles, it gives him the wastelands in color. He's not sure when it started, but he hates it even more than the sepia and the greyscale skies. The colors strike something in him, something hard and painful and vicious, a piece of his heart left in a desert he's never seen before.

He sees it in a yellow scarf dangling from a tree branch. Gia is nowhere to be found. A black jacket he's holding, his hands running over the fabric. No Jake to make him laugh tonight. A computer with a password he doesn't know, and no Noah to hack into it for him. 

A camera with pictures - pictures of him, of them, smiling and laughing, and the trees of this world, the lights and colors of this world - but no Emma to help him count the stars.

He wakes up shaking and terrified and hollow inside, like someone carved out his heart with a knife. He's had a lot of nightmares, but he's never felt so lonely as he does when he wakes up feeling like he's the only survivor of an apocalypse.

-:-

The first time he lets it slip - the death, the bloodshed, the pain - he's outside in the park with Emma, night falling over them in a cloud of inky black skies and sparkling stars. Emma with her camera pointed up at the heavens is a picture he's seen so many times, before he even met her, before he even knew her name - he can't help himself when he tells her that he's dreamed about her.

She doesn't say anything for a moment, staring at him the way she stares at things she doesn't quite understand - and she stares at him that way quite a lot. Her gaze is sharp but not unkind; thoughtful and curious and seeming to reach to the depths of his soul and judging him on what she finds there.

He hopes she doesn't find him wanting.

Emma offers him her notebook and pencil, asks him, _show me what you dreamed?_ and so he sits on the hillside with her taking pictures of the world he's fighting to protect and draws her the world he failed.

The wasteland, the glass dome, the single yellow flower. Emma, pink and radiant, in the forest, by the flowers, beneath the sun where she belongs. The world she loves and the one that lost her. She sits down beside him when he's finished and runs her finger over the drawing of her - sketched out and hazy, but still unmistakably her. On the next page, he draws her the rest of them; Gia fighting monsters, Jake playing soccer, Noah at a computer. Robo Knight on a battlefield. A boy he doesn't yet know in a rock quarry. All the heroes that live and die in his mind a thousand times over, night after night.

_Troy_ , she whispers when he finishes and the clock strikes two and neither of them have moved from the hill to return home. She says his name like it's a shattered promise, something that's been broken too many times to fix. _How long_?

_As long as I can remember. As long as I've been dreaming, I've been dreaming of this_.

_Of us,_ she corrects, closing the book. _Maybe it's a sign._

_Or maybe it's a prophecy._

-:-

Because he knows - he knows, and he knows it's the first thought to cross her mind, too - that dreams are often omens and Noah said they can foretell the future. Maybe not through science, but through something. Magic. Gods. _Power_.

And he has plenty of power. If his dreams of the team were a window to look through the future, even though he didn't know it yet, who's to say the ones of the wasteland aren't the same? A world without power - a world without _them_. Without heroes, without protectors. Without his friends.

He had thought, once, that he could survive without them. A new city, a new home, all new people. He didn't need that. Didn't need friends, didn't need a new family, didn't need a new home.

But now he trains on the same rooftop overlooking the same city and thinks of all the lives he's saved, the life he's built, the world around him, the people he loves.

If he's alive in the wasteland world, he knows this: he doesn't want to be.

-:-

Orion falls out of the sky, just like he dreamed. In the waking hours, his dreams are more hazy memories than the crystal-clear visions they are at night, so he doesn't think to tell Emma until the battle is over that this is it -- he's the boy. The last one of his dreams, the last of the six whose faces were imprinted on the inside of his eyelids before he even knew Harwood County existed.

Emma is lying in his bed wearing only his sheets when he whispers it into her ear -- the dreams are still coming true, piece by piece by piece. He doesn't know which battle they're leading to - the one that wiped out humanity in brutal, robotic efficiency, or the one where they all stand back to back with a legacy behind them, cutting down soldiers left and right. He only knows the outcome of one; doesn't want to guess at the other.

And then, of course, there are the battles in between. The battles before. The battles after. He doesn't know how she can sleep by his side some nights, when he still wakes up shaking, sweating, about to scream. When he has to clutch her to him, to make sure she's still alive. He doesn't know if it helps or hurts him more that she's with him. Doesn't know if she triggers the nightmares by being alive or calms them down by being there.

Emma kisses him, traces an _I love you_ onto his chest, promises, _We'll be all right. We've won every battle so far. We will win the rest._

But they haven't won all of them. They won't win all of them. Troy closes his eyes that night and dreams of glowing golden in a warehouse, dreams of the sea as a cradle, the sea as a deathbed, dreams of loss and wakes up with his thoughts ablaze.

-:-

Orion tells him they have a word for people like him on Andresia. The word, roughly translated, means _dreamwalker_. Somebody who can wander between realities in dreams, can craft truth from nightmares, can foretell the future, if the gods so desire. Most people don't have space for two worlds in their dreams, but Troy has power, has strength, has the attention of a force that flows through them all.

Maybe it's some pantheon of gods playing tricks on him. Filling his mind with a dozen alternate realities, some of which may come true, some of which he may never see. Their idea of a cosmic joke - take a teenage boy, steal his dreams, steal his youth, pump him full of power, set him loose upon the monsters.

He asks, _Is there any way to make them stop?_ Orion doesn't say no, but he doesn't have to. If the dreams have chosen him, he's stuck until they come true.

He doesn't dream about his team anymore, not now that he's met them, stood with them, loved them. He still dreams of the other teams -- past, present, future. The desert of the past, the wastelands of the future. The spaceship, the clock tower, the island, the academy. People he only recognizes now through the suits they wear and the powers they hold. Orion says that some of it is set in stone, some of it might be true in another world, and some of it - some of it might be coming true very soon.

The nightmares still come, but at least now he has Emma.

-:-

The battles come. Not all of the ones he's dreamed about, but enough of them. Too many of them. The worst ones. He glows gold in a warehouse and thinks to himself, _I never asked for this_. The light of a key flickers out in their base and he thinks, _None of us ever asked for this._

Emma cries. He doesn't do anything, can't do anything. Stands there frozen thinking of wastelands and heroes and death and what it means to sacrifice yourself for the people you love. Thinks of the world without Emma, thinks of losing her, losing Gia, Jake, Noah, Orion. Losing everyone he's ever held dear.

Wonders how his father keeps fighting wars. Wonders how his father handled losing his mother. Wonders about the old teams, if they ever lost a ranger the way they did. The way he did.

Orion is lying half-dead in the sea when they find him. Troy's hands are shaking, saltwater up to his knees, the winds chilling his bones. In another dream, he had seen Orion fall out of the sky and crash to Earth, dead. In another dream, he had seen them all die at the hands of monsters too monstrous even for them.

Orion is alive. Robo Knight is dead. Victory and loss. War and sacrifice. The seven of them as pawns on a chess board for some cruel, bored deities.

He doesn't dream anything that night. Thinks maybe the gods are apologizing to him.

-:-

The night before the world goes to hell, Emma curls up next to him, kisses him, and makes him promise he won't die. _We've lost too much already. I can't lose you, too._

He kisses her back, but he doesn't promise anything. He can't. If it comes down to it, him or Emma, him or any of the others, he knows what his choice is. If there's a world where he is alive and his team isn't, it will not be this one. He'll make sure of it.

The battle comes, as all battles do, with a bang. A monster in the sky. Ships firing at the planet. Old heroes rising from the ashes and the six of them around a fire, praying for the dawn.

Dawn comes. Dawn goes. He flies up to space and slays the monster. Victory is hard-earned, but he does earn it. Tomorrow, he promises himself, tomorrow he will be free.

And then the rest attack. He hates himself a little for dreaming about it all those years ago, for willing this battle into existence. They are tired and broken and drained. The world is a wreckage of an invasion they gave their childhoods to end. It should be over by now.

He stands in a quarry and sees the wasteland it could be. Sees the flower, sees the smoke. The ashes of this world in another.

He gets ready to fight again.

-:-

In the end, they survive. His dreams come true in a rush of smoke and fire and explosions, a blaze of heroes and colors and power, and the triumph is written in the set of his shoulders, in Gia's nod, Emma's smile, Jake's stance, Noah's words, Orion coming back for them. They came too far to fail, too far to fall.

He drives his sword into the Earth and leaves it there. It's no flower, but maybe it's what this world needs instead.

That night, he lies in bed with Emma and dreams of the wastelands again. The world has a name now, it comes to him in the moonlight, a word soft and shaped with war. _Corinth_. In the waking hours, he's only seen the city at peace. At night, he dreams of it the way that it used to be.

This time, he dreams of the glass dome. Inside, a new world flourishing, flowers growing from the embers of apocalypse. Heroes, suits he recognizes, suits he's worn himself, fighting the war he'd won once before.

A better world. One that matters to somebody, somebody he knows, now. Somebody who's a part of him, even though he's left behind his sword.

His dreams don't turn into nightmares anymore. Maybe the world has stopped making a plaything of a boy who only ever fought to save it.


End file.
